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Barrie Hill Farms buzzing as the place to bee

Hardy bumblebees brought in at Springwater Township to help with blueberry crop

SPRINGWATER TWP. -- Barrie Hill Farms has been in business for more than 50 years and knows the industry inside and out, which is why they aren’t taking any chances with their popular blueberry crops this season.

The farm located Barrie Hill Road in Springwater Township, just outside Barrie, is one of the busiest spots to be in the summer for blueberry picking and produce shopping.

With temperatures remaining cooler longer, the farm’s owner and farmer Morris Gervais told BarrieToday of a system they’ve been using for years in order to keep the blueberries ripe and delicious when they need to be.

“This is the first of our bees that are arriving to help pollinate our blueberry crops,” Gervais said. “These ones in now are bumblebees that are reared indoors ahead of time so that we have worker bees available to work in the blueberries.

"In nature, the only bumblebees that would be out and foraging would be the queen bees in May, it’s later in the season that the worker bees come out and we need our crops dealt with sooner than that and this allows that," he added. 

Koppert Biological Systems provides the specialized boxes that each contain four colonies. The bees were already out working on Sunday as Gervais told BarrieToday bumblebees are crucial for a farm at this time of year because of their ability to work in less-than-ideal conditions.

“Bumblebees will work at a colder temperature and in stronger winds than honeybees,” Gervais said. “Domestic honeybees are not native to this part of the world and so they really don’t like pollinating the blossoms on the cooler days, where bumblebees will fly through the cold and wind with their bigger bodies.”

A strawberry flower is wide open and can be pollinated by wind and other insects, where the blueberry flower is in the shape of a bell and has a short window of pollination, so having the bumblebees is a form of insurance for the farm’s blueberry crops.

“Every blueberry needs at least one visit from a bee and with the window being only four or five days, we need to make sure they get pollinated no matter the weather,” Gervais said. “I may not have enough to pollinate my whole crop, but it will be enough to mitigate what would be if I only relied on domestic honeybees.”

After having used the Quads boxes from Koppert for many years, the bee population has risen at Barrie Hill Farms, even after the winters.

“These colonies in the Quads won’t make it through the winter. The queen will survive and burrow in the ground and there are many more natural colonies because we have imported the Koppert boxes,” said Gervais.

Approximately 80 to 90 hives of honeybees will also be on the way when the weather gets warmer, just to make sure the farm’s blueberries are ready to go from mid-July to late-September.

Right now, is the season for asparagus and Barrie Hill Farms is offering pick-your-own-asparagus for the first time.